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US brain trust: Beware of trawling-for-terrorist apps

Are your rights intruded?

Surveillance programs that try to identify terrorists by trawling the internet and electronic databases for tell-tale signs are of limited success and should be carefully evaluated for privacy concerns, a group of technologists and policy makers that advises the US government said.

A 352-page report issued Tuesday by the National Research Council can be viewed as a partial rejection of US government data-mining efforts, such as its Total Information Awareness program. The programs try to identify terrorist activity by piecing together disparate details found in chat forums, credit card processing records, and commercial databases. Civil libertarians have long warned they pose a threat to the privacy of ordinary people. The NRC report appeared to agree.

"These new technologies, coupled with the unprecedented nature of the threat, are likely to bring great pressure to apply these technologies and measures, some of which might intrude on the fundamental rights of US citizens," the report warns. Elsewhere it concluded: "The current policy regime does not adequately address violations of privacy that arise from information-based programs using advanced analytical techniques, such as state-of-the-art data mining and record linkage."

The report goes on to say that automated identification of terrorists through such measures "is neither feasible as an objective nor desirable as a goal of the technology development efforts." It also warns that unavoidable false positives will result in the surveillance of "ordinary, law-abiding citizens and businesses."

The report was written by a committee that was headed by William Perry, a former US secretary of defense under President Bill Clinton who is now a professor at Stanford University. The committee included professors of law and science from Carnegie Mellon University, the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, Johns Hopkins University and the Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research at Indiana University. Other members were researchers at Google and Microsoft.

The authors recommend that the US government follow guidelines to evaluate whether data mining programs are effective, legal, and conform to US values. They also suggest laws mandating such programs be evaluated periodically.

The report was sponsored by the US Department of Homeland Security. As best we can tell, it's not available online, but excerpts can be read or skimmed here. ®